For the third month of the bookclub I have never actually attended, we will be reading a nonfiction book, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your Amercian History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen. Normally I wouldn’t be thrilled about being handed a hefty nonfiction book for my “pleasure reading,” but this one has a great big kudos from Howard Zinn himself, author of A People’s History of the United States, a book that has been in my top five books-I-need-to-find-time-to-read for fifteen years. Plus the man who recommended it to the group is a history teacher. Plus it’s supposedly a national bestseller.
It already made a new wrinkle in my brain with the word samizdat, which is the clandestine operation of printing and distributing banned books.
Each month, this book club lets a member chose a book for the following month’s meeting. Interestingly, the member must choose a book s/he has never read. Last week’s season premier of Lost illustrated why that rule is important. Did you catch the beginning, where the man in the book club thinks the hostess picked the book intentionally to piss him off, and she says that on the contrary that it happens to be her favorite book? Ouch. Who needs that kind of dynamic outside of work?!
I may never get to choose a book – although I like to fantasize about what book I might choose – because I imagine that membership would include attendance at the damn meetings. Maybe next month I’ll meet these fellow readers.
I’m on my last short story in Jhumpa Lahiri’s interpreter of maladies. I find this book very sad and best taken in small doses. I think the sadness was intensified by being able to relate to the”out-of-context lives of immigrants, expatriates, and first-generation Americans” (Wall Street Journal).